Co-occurrence or
cooccurrence is a linguistics term that can either mean
concurrence /
coincidence or, in a more specific sense, the above-chance frequent
occurrence of two
terms from a
text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this
linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of
semantic proximity or an
idiomatic expression. In contrast to
collocation, co-occurrence assumes interdependency of the two terms. A
co-occurrence restriction is identified when linguistic elements never occur together. Analysis of these restrictions can lead to discoveries about the structure and development of a language.